“Did either of you find a ring back here?” Gillian asks.

The girls are both shivering now, and the sky is black. You’d think it was midnight. You’d think it was impossible for the heavens to have ever been blue, like ink, or robins’ eggs; like the ribbons girls thread through their hair for luck.

“A toad brought one into the house,” Kylie says. “I forgot all about it.”

“It was his.” Gillian’s voice doesn’t even sound like her. This voice is too thick and sad, and much too distant. “Jimmy’s.”

“Who’s Jimmy?” Antonia says. When no one answers her she looks to the hedge of thorns, and then she knows. “He’s back there.” Antonia leans against her sister.

If it storms as badly as the meteorologists have predicted and the yard should flood, then what? Gillian and Kylie and Antonia are drenched through and through; the umbrella Antonia holds aloft can’t protect them. Their hair is plastered to their heads; their clothes will have to be wrung out in the shower.

The ground near the thornbushes looks indented, as if it were already sinking in upon itself or, worse, sinking in on Jimmy. If he rises to the surface, like his silver ring, like some horrid, wicked fish, it will be over for them.

“I want my mother,” Antonia says in a very small voice.

When they finally turn and run for the house, the lawn squishes under their feet. They run even faster; they run as though their nightmares were right behind them on the grass. Once they’re inside, Gillian locks the door, then drags a chair over and positions it under the doorknob.

That dark June night when Gillian pulled into the driveway under a circle of light may as well have been a hundred years ago. She isn’t the same person she was when she arrived. That woman who tiptoed up to the front door with the sort of urgency only desperation can dispense would have already packed her car and been gone. She would never have stuck around to see what that investigator from Tucson would do with everything Sally told him. She wouldn’t have remained in the vicinity, and she wouldn’t have left a note behind for Ben Frye, even if she cared for him the way she does tonight. She’d be halfway through Pennsylvania by this time, with the radio on, loud, and a full tank of gas. She wouldn’t bother to look in her rearview mirror, not for a minute, not once. And that’s the difference, it’s simple and it’s plain: The person that’s here now isn’t going anywhere, except into the kitchen to fix her nieces some camomile tea to settle their nerves.

“We’re perfectly fine,” she tells the girls. Her hair is a disaster and her breathing is ragged; mascara is streaked across her pale skin in wavering lines. Still, she’s the one who’s here, not Sally, and it’s up to her to send the girls to bed and to assure them that she can take care of things. No need to worry, that’s what she tells them. They’re safe and sound tonight. While the rain pours down, while the wind rises in the east, Gillian will think of a plan, she’ll have to, because Sally could no more help her figure out what to do than she could leap from a tree and fly.

No longer balanced by logic, Sally is weightless tonight. She, who has always valued the sensible and the useful above all else, lost her way as soon as she drove down the Turnpike. She couldn’t find the Hide-A-Way Motel, though she’s passed it a thousand times before. She had to stop at a gas station and ask directions, and then she had her heart-attack thing, which forced her to search out the filthy restroom, where she washed her face with cool water. She looked at her reflection in the smudged mirror above the sink and breathed deeply for several minutes until she was steady once more.

But she soon discovered that she wasn’t as steady as she’d thought. She didn’t see the brake lights of the car ahead of her after she’d pulled back onto the Turnpike, and there was a minor fender-bender, which was completely her fault. The left headlight of her Honda is now barely attached and is in danger of falling off completely every time she steps on the brake.

By the time she finally pulls up to the Hide-A-Way, her family at home is halfway through dinner, and the parking lot of the fried-chicken franchise diagonally across the Turnpike is packed with customers. But food is the last thing Sally wants. Her stomach is jumpy and she’s nervous, she’s insanely nervous, which is probably why she brushes her hair twice before she gets out of the car and starts for the motel office. Pools of oil shimmer on the asphalt; one lonely crab apple tree, plopped down in the single plot of earth and surrounded by some red geraniums, shudders when the traffic on the Turnpike zooms by. Only four cars are parked in the lot, and three are real bombs. If she were looking for Gary’s car, the one farthest from the office would seem the most likely choice—it’s a Ford of some sort and it looks like a rental car. But more than that, it’s been left there so neatly and carefully, exactly the way Sally would imagine Gary would park his car.